Peggy Say: Fighter For Her Hostage Brother

Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter kidnapped at gunpoint in Beirut six years ago, now holds the unfortunate record of being the longest held American hostage. His indomitable sister Peggy Say, who has kept his case in the public eye, has published a book to remind us that Anderson is still not a free man and to ask yet again why the American government has not been able to engineer his release.

Having read this book, I`m afraid I don`t have a satisfying answer. But I learned plenty along the way about the inner workings of hostage initiatives and government stonewalling. Say has quite a story to tell. ``Forgotten`` may be the year`s best political book, made doubly timely by the war in the Gulf. Say admits that she was not especially close to the kid brother she regarded as ``a nonentity`` while they were growing up in a small town in upstate New York. She was the family rebel, the tough girl, while little Terry, who could do no wrong, was the apple of his father`s eye. She was floundering in a bad marriage with two small children and waiting on tables when he joined the Marines. Terry hooked up with the AP in Japan while she got divorced and remarried and took a job as a restaurant cook. He was sent to troubled Beirut as AP bureau chief; she went back to school to get a college degree. There were few connections in their lives until March 16, 1985, when Terry was grabbed and hustled into a waiting car by three armed men.

I don`t think Say would mind if I underline the irony that her kid brother`s ordeal became the galvanizing event that freed her to become the high-powered woman of purpose she`d always wanted to be. For as Terry Anderson`s world shrank to the dimensions of a dark, locked room, Peggy Say`s expanded to meet the challenge of bringing him home.

Soon she was expressing her opinions to the president of the United States, chatting up Oliver North, meeting with Yasser Arafat, doing her five minutes with the ``Today`` show`s Jane Pauley and flying to Rome, Athens, Damascus and other distant places whenever some foreign diplomat or shady arms dealer showed interest in mediating the hostage crisis. The small-town housewife and mother, as she liked to call herself, marched into a leadership vacuum out of sheer frustration. It gave her a bad case of ulcers.

Say wasn`t cowed, though, when a minor government aide, full of self-importance, accused her of the sin of ``bracket-creeping,`` State

Department-ese for trying to reach higher officials than a cause supposedly merits. A bracket-creeper with a vengeance, Peggy Say became the media`s favorite spokesperson for all the stricken family members of the growing group of hostages held in Lebanon.

The State Department was initially confused as to who was holding Terry Anderson and why, but it now can be said with reasonable accuracy that he was captured by a little-known terrorist group called Hezbollah, a Shiite fundamentalist Muslim faction of pro-Iranian Lebanese seeking the release of Shiite prisoners held in Kuwait.

A score of hostages were taken by Hezbollah, and at various times they were offered as ``trade bait`` for arms, money and Shiite prisoners held by other Muslim factions, the Israelis and the Christian Lebanese. Several of those hostages have since been released. Some were executed. Two were callously traded for arms and cash to Libya`s Khaddafi, who promptly sent them to their deaths to teach the Americans a lesson after we bombed his bunker.

The whole Middle East hostage story is an ugly, complicated nightmare of ruthless dictators and petty warlords trading innocent human lives in the name of nationalism and religion.

Which brings us to the heart of Peggy Say`s story. How far should America go in rescuing its nationals on foreign soil when they fall victim to a hostage ``situation,`` even if they have ignored their government`s warnings to come home because their safety could not be guaranteed? The emotional answer is easy: get them out. The practical answer is less straightforward, as Say was to learn.

During the Reagan years, our government proclaimed a strict public policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists-``No arms for hostages``-while privately Col. Oliver North was delegated to do the dirty work behind the scenes. (Say`s clear-eyed account of her dealings with North are worth the price of this book.)

Since the Iran-contra debacle, Say has heard many rumors of her brother`s imminent release, but none has panned out. With the help of her collaborator, Peter Knobler, she vents her rage and frustration, and who can blame her? We should be grateful as a nation that there are people like Peggy Say to keep alive issues that are so painful and confusing that we`d just as soon forget them.

I hope that soon Terry Anderson will be able to tell his own story. In the meantime, it should give him courage to know that he has a remarkable sister.